Have you experienced working in an environment with a negative or even toxic culture?
Maybe in your team or even in the overall company?
Over the course of their career, many people get to experience this - it's unfortunately something common in the modern workplace. With regards to toxic teams and an overall negative company culture, Forbes has come up with a list of 5 main reasons behind it:
Lack of accountability to team values: Does the team know which values are expected in the team, and do employees feel responsible for them?
Fear: Fear destroys team culture, faster than anything else.
Lack of trust: Without trust in the leader or other team members, a good performance of the team is not possible.
Lack of recognition: It's very damaging to morale when a team feels like their contributions don’t matter.
Lack of a clear and embraced common goal: Does the team know why they should work together and what's the desired outcome all of them share?
When looking at these 5 important factors, it's clear they all share one commonality: Bad management. A good manager can eliminate these factors over time, under a bad manager they can spread easily and multiply.
Building a positive culture in your team is easier said than done. This quote from Julie Zhuo (Author of The Making of a Manager) gives hope for managers struggling with this task:
"Great managers are made, not born".
People often don't already intuitively know how to be a good leader, but it's a skill that usually can be trained and learned. Consequently, there are many lessons a manager has to learn on their path to become more effective in building a great team with a positive culture. In this article I will share my own experience and learnings related to this topic.
My own experience with negative culture
When I came to Taiwan in 2018, I was new to a formal management role, especially in a foreign country. I returned to a place where I have already spent half year as a student. I still remember how nice everyone was to each other here, how happily people talked on the street and how curious and positive everyone was.
However, one thing I noticed soon after coming back for work is that once salary, bonuses, promotion and status in the workplace are involved, some people would behave differently. Even though it should be in everyone's best interests to work together positively and supportively, I have experienced situations where this was not the case. I also experienced gossip in the workplace, which could divide the team apart and make the affected colleagues feel insecure and upset. According to friends in other organizations I talked to, this is unfortunately not uncommon in Taiwan. I was sharing some of this experience at an alumni event at my old university in Kaohsiung, and to my surprise I got positive comments for it from the staff - apparently this issue is often not talked about.
Luckily the situation has already improved a lot, but having gone through these experiences taught me a valuable lesson: As a manager, if you take your role seriously, you are responsible for the environment that's being created under your watch. In hindsight with over four years of experience, I would now do some things differently.
How have I as a manager contributed to the issue?
It's not easy to fully understand the cause of every conflict at the workplace. It could be related to the personality of every team member. It could be anything an employee is going through personally which reflects their behavior in the workplace, or the overall company culture that supports or suppresses a certain behavior.
A company culture is developing every day, based on the behavior and actions of management and employees - as a manager you have a very important function when it comes to building the right culture. Looking back at my earlier days of being a manager, I can now recognize some things I did which were not very helpful:
Unclear understanding of the job roles during hiring process
One problem was that I was new to the role myself: Very soon after having started with the company, I was already on my way to Taiwan holding job interviews. Back then, I wasn't actually sure yet which employees with which skills I would need in my team, and obviously then I couldn't give a very clear description of the role to the applicants yet. As we just started to settle in our new office, especially in the beginning tasks came up which were not mentioned in the interview - it was more a startup-environment, and once certain tasks pop up, someone needed to take care of it. For some employees, this can be very exciting - if they look for this type of role. If employees expect a more stable and predictable work environment, this situation can create uncertainty.
Unclear expectations from my side
I still remember day 1 in our office - we were about to start working, and the team was about to get to know each other for the first time. I ordered breakfast for everyone, we sat down in the kitchen and talked. I wanted to encourage everyone to introduce themselves, so I started. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I recall it was something like this: "Hi, my name is Daniel, I am from Austria and like to do sports. I studied in Kaohsiung before and really like Taiwan. I am looking forward to getting to know you and to working together." I sure said more than that, but that or the following days I didn't mention anything about my expectations for this team or what kind of culture we want to establish. I also didn't have 1on1s with my team members to talk with them about their roles again once they started working, and didn't really set the direction and priorities. After all, I hired people who are more experienced than me already, so I hoped everything would work out by itself. It turned out being a manager was not that simple...
Limited experience
When I started my position in Taiwan it was my first management role, my first time working in a permanent position abroad, and my first full-time job after my graduation. My training before coming to Taiwan was short, there were many things which I still had to learn on the job. When my team members asked me for a decision or for help to solve a problem, very often in the beginning my answer was "I am sorry but I don't have the answer right now, but I will check and let you know." Sometimes I was able to give an answer, but then only later realized there is a better way to solve the problem, so I had to take it back and revise it again. As a manager, you want to give your employees the confidence that they can come to you with problems which you can help them to solve. If you can't, you have to spend a long time on it or even have to revise already given answers, it will not create trust in you or your decision making ability - especially if employees in your team are already more experienced themselves.
Little communication
Especially in my first year I was BUSY! Everything was new, a lot of processes had to be defined and established, and because of the small team size I still had to do many tasks by myself. I was usually working late and often felt very tired. During this stressful period, I actually was quite happy if my team members would work independently and not bring too many problems to me, as my own plate was already full. However, due to this ongoing situation, communication with my team members became limited, except for absolutely necessary topics. As long as they did their job, I didn't think communicating with them was a task to prioritize during an already full schedule. Only later I realized that this led to misunderstandings and misinterpretations on both sides, and to a lack of common understanding and direction. Employees didn't really understand what my intentions were, and I was not fully aware of their point of view.
Making decisions without involving the team
It happened a few times especially during the early stage that a process needed to be adjusted to better fit our daily operations. Sometimes I thought I knew what the new process should look like, and didn't think it's necessary to involve employees affected by the change before actually implementing it, it's enough to just announce it. It happened a few times that me or other managers announced a new process, which actually led to extra work or inefficiencies which we didn't see at the time. A situation like this leads to frustration, often a failed implementation and a decreased trust and understanding on both sides.
Not addressing problems on time
When doing my research about how to build a better team culture back then, I came across the following famous quote by Gruenter and Whitaker:
"The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate."
I believe this statement has a lot of truth in it. At times I realized the culture in my team was not exactly how I wanted it to be. However, I thought there were more urgent things to solve, so I just avoided addressing the problem. The culture obviously didn't get any better by itself, and being non-reactive about it can even support it.
Looking back now, I can better understand how my behavior has unintendedly contributed to the problem. Luckily, over the years I could learn from these experiences, find my own solutions to address them and can better avoid them from happening in the first place. I will summarize these learnings in Part II.
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